Straight men kissing? That’s so hot!!!

Straight men in Britain generally have no problem kissing each other on the lips — and in fact locking lips has become something of a fad for college students, according to a gay lecturer at Bath University who did his PhD on the subject.

The lecturer, Eric Anderson, conducted a survey which found that 88 percent of men are happy to kiss another man on the lips, while almost 40 percent have engaged in “sustained kissing, initially for shock value, but now just for ‘a laugh.'”

Anderson said he believes his research indicates that homophobia is all but gone among young people. The Guardian reports:

Anderson says men are now kissing each other to show their “intimacy towards one another,” but not in a homosexual way. “The kisses seem to be stripped of sexual connotation, and given the percentage of men doing them, they certainly do not indicate a hidden homosexual desire.”

The trend, he adds, is not just in a few UK universities or even limited to Britain. “I’ve interviewed graduate students who did their bachelor degrees at other universities, and been to undergraduate clubs and pubs from Bristol to Birmingham to Edinburgh – I can definitively say that although the percentages might vary depending on the city, the class and the racial background, these kissing behaviours are happening all over the country. I have also found it occurring in a fifth of the 60 university soccer players I interviewed in the US, and have a friend who is beginning formal research into male kissing in Australia after recording it there.”

Call us shallow, but we admit our first reaction to this report was, that’s so hot! Our second was, when is this going to catch on in the U.S.? And our third was, this guy has the best job in the world, which was backed up by this tidbit at the end of the story about his next project:

Anderson is now moving his research on to cuddling. “Last week, I was talking to my second-year students about two straight men cuddling; they laughed, ‘what’s the big deal about that’,” he says. “I polled them, and found that 14/15 said they had spooned another man, in bed, sleeping all night long. Gone are the days in which men would rather sleep on the floor or head to toe; not only do they share beds and cuddle, but they are not homosexualised for this.”